This is Abraham Cherrix. He's sixteen years old, so in five years he'll be my age. Nice guy, very cheerful, very hopeful about the future. The only problem is that there's almost no chance he'll survive for those five years.The following is the text of a ten-minute talk I gave during a job interview (they'd asked me for a talk on "absolutely anything"). I was successful in my application, so it can't have been that bad! It even comes with powerpoint slides. If this is of use to anyone in an educational context, feel free to plagiarise any and all of it.
This is Abraham Cherrix. He's sixteen years old, so in five years he'll be my age. Nice guy, very cheerful, very hopeful about the future. The only problem is that there's almost no chance he'll survive for those five years.
Abraham Cherrix has a cancerous condition known as Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Now, normally this in itself would not be a cause to start carving the tombstone. These days, judicious use of chemotherapy and radiotherapy can give survival rates of up to 70% if the cancer's caught in time. However, Abraham Cherrix has chosen to forgo chemotherapy in favour of an alternative medicine known as the Hoxsey treatment. Despite the claims by its proponents of an 80% survival rate, there is zero evidence that it has any effect whatsoever. Abraham, unfortunately, appears to have fallen for the claims of a crank.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a crank as "an eccentric or obsessive person", but in common parlance the word has come to mean someone who holds to counterfactual beliefs in the face of the evidence. Cranks cannot be swayed by reasoned argument - they rationalise away any facts that contradict their claims and carry on their merry way.
This wouldn't be a problem except that people frequently come to believe them, sometimes with lethal consequences. Both cranks themselves and the followers they attract can be recognised by a deep unwillingness to give up on their pet theory. It's a surprisingly common condition, not least because a nonspecialist can never really tell the difference between a real expert and someone who just thinks they know their stuff.
So how do we avoid falling for cranks? How do we know who to trust? Well, there is a relatively simple solution. Cranks, pretty much by definition, don't get results. If we can limit ourselves to trusting people or groups who are repeatedly proved right by experience, we won't go too far wrong. In modern society, that means one group: the scientific community.
It's generally accepted that the scientific community first arose in the 16th Century, with the introduction of heliocentrism by Copernicus. Despite squabbles with the early Church, it quickly grew in size and reputation, captivating businesses with the success of its predictions. Almost any product you see around you today would have been impossible in the pre-scientific era. No-one was quite sure why science was so effective, but it certainly worked.
However, as science's reputation grew, the cranks started circling. Since there was no real way of telling what was science and what wasn't, they were easily able to leech off the scientific community's good name. Even the astrologers were claiming to be "scientific". We needed some sort of demarcation.
Eventually the philosophers and scientists got together and figured out a couple of core principles. Firstly, there was the concept of falsifiability. For a hypothesis to be scientific, it had to be falsifiable - there must be some experiment that could prove it false. Thus, science would be able to gradually home in on the accurate explanations by process of elimination. That took care of the astrologers and psychics - if you've ever been to one you'll notice that they basically declare victory no matter what happens.
Secondly, there was the concept of peer review. The idea is simple: any one person can turn into a crank, but the chances of a whole group going loopy at the same time is much smaller. So, if lots of other people are able to check your workings, the results are more reliable. These days, the way that works is via scientific journals, which act as clearing-houses for hypotheses.
So, that gives us a short history of how people have come to deal with cranks over the years. But it's all quite abstract information. Say you were chatting with someone and they started talking to you about their wonderful new discovery - a cure for cancer. How would you tell if they were a crank or not?
Well, we've already discussed the two reasons why the scientific community is so effective - there's no shame in appealing to those. You could test them on falsifiability by asking what experiments they'd done, what predictions they'd made, what results would have proved them wrong. You could test them on peer review by asking what mainstream scientists thought about their discovery, what mainstream journals had published their research, what criticisms people had made of their work. A scientist will generally be happy to answer these questions.
Now, all this can get a bit complicated, and it's possible for cranks to slip through the cracks, or create their own journals, or just outright lie. Fortunately for us, many cranks tend to have similar personality traits, which we can learn to recognise.
Number 1: Conspiracy theorists are (usually) cranks. A common attitude among cranks is that the world is out to get them, to suppress their wonderful idea. The purveyors of folk medicine say that the pharmaceutical companies are out to get them; for the inventors of perpetual-motion machines it's the oil companies; most other cranks just claim that their opponents are all dogmatic and stubborn.
Number 2: Egotists are (usually) cranks. Now I'm not talking just about people who think they're smart or right - I mean people who think they're smarter and righter than everyone else on the face of the planet. They tend to compare themselves to Einstein a lot. A common hobby of these people is to point out "obvious flaws" in the prevailing scientific theories, for example saying that thermodynamics proves evolution can't happen, or the flatness of lakes proves the Earth can't be a sphere.
Number 3: Snake-oil salesmen are (usually) cranks. Now, this one isn't a hard and fast rule - many scientists have good presentation skills and many cranks are completely inept - but if someone's hyping a new discovery they've made, and they've persuaded most of the audience with arcane technobabble, and yet you suddenly realise they haven't actually presented any concrete findings or working models, chances are they're a crank. Or at least very unscrupulous.
I'm going to briefly recap the stuff we've covered. Firstly, I discussed what cranks are and why they're dangerous. Secondly, I discussed science, the approach to crank-detection that's historically had the most success. Thirdly, I discussed a few common characteristics of cranks. I should note that there are many more crank characteristics and catchphrases - I could easily talk for a full hour on them.
I hope you've found this talk interesting and that you'll decide to hire me on the spot. Even if you haven't, though, I hope you've at least come away with some useful information, because this subject is important. Next time you meet someone who behaves like a crank, next time you come across some daft pseudoscience, and next time you're tempted to just accept it - remember Abraham Cherrix and his imminent death. Remember that it could happen to you!
Thank you.